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Category: Universities

If University Presidents had a Union

It occurred to me while writing that last piece about salary comparisons: what if University Presidents used the same set of arguments about salary that professors do?  What if we set their salaries as a function of what a comparator set of institutions were paying? For this exercise, I have compared the presidential salaries at each of the top eight Canadian institutions in the Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities to those at the nearest comparator institutions among public universities

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February 13, 2013 1 Comment

How to Compare Salaries

One of the things that keeps popping up in labour relations is the salary comparison: a union at one institution says, “we deserve what professors at the University of X get”.  It’s a reasonable tactic, but making useful and accurate comparisons at the institutional level is much harder than it looks, and one needs to be alert to the possibility of cherry-picking comparisons. Academic salaries in Canada are, for the most part, based on three things: rank, years of service,

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February 12, 2013 1 Comment

The Demand for PSE: Never as Simple as You Think

The New York Times website had a great little graphic the other day about youth unemployment rates in urban China.  It looked like this:  Unemployment in Urban China, 20-24 year-olds               For people who see higher education entirely in terms of “work outcomes”, this kind of chart is deeply perplexing.  If higher education doesn’t pay, why do Chinese students keep lining up for university? There are really two sets of answers. First, one shouldn’t

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February 11, 2013 2 Comments

Paying it Forward in Tech Transfer

An interesting item from my hometown, last week: the University of Manitoba is starting to license technology for free. I exaggerate slightly.  What they appear to be doing is issuing technology, licensed for a percentage of the future net revenue, rather than for an up-front fee; the cost only kicks-in once the company starts making money.  U of M describes this arrangement as unique; but while this specific legal arrangement may be so, it’s actually part of a broader and

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February 7, 2013 No Comments

Rankings Touchiness (Part 2)

As I noted yesterday, the basic fight over rankings in higher education boils down to two questions: should institutions be judged as whole entities, or on the basis of their constitutent parts?  And, should rankings give primacy to the existing hierarchy of values of higher education (i.e. research and publication), or to something else? Let’s start with the first question.   There’s absolutely nothing stopping us from ranking individual bits of the university, as opposed to the entire institution.  We’ve had

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February 6, 2013 No Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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